Proactive Monitoring Strategies For Cloud Apps: Google+ Hangout Recap

There are a lot of ways to have a discussion on monitoring – what is being monitored or how deep you want to go in the stack. If you are interested in those particular topics, you might want to check out this post on three things you should monitor, along with screencasts on how to implement the tools.

However, the approach that we took in this hangout was to look at the lifecycle of the project: how does monitoring affect planning, the build and maintenance of your solution? Here were some of the topics that came up, and as always you can watch the entire hangout below.

Racker Drew Cox examined the importance of discussing what parts of your configuration need to be monitored to provide insight into key metrics for the health of your environment. This is important to do as you plan out your configuration to ensure that the critical pieces are being monitored before you get to the build stage.

You shouldn’t simply deploy a monitoring plan and hope it works; you need to make sure that it is working according to plan. Drew discussed the importance of verifying the monitoring functionality by tripping the monitoring alerts on purpose.

Remember that two very important things, monitoring and backups, are not set up by default for your configuration. This is because there are many different variables and preferences that customers have. However, it is extremely important to get these configured as you bring your system online. Rackspace is always here to help, and if you have questions about how to get them configured, be sure to give us a call when you are in the planning stage!

Don’t forget to check out this week’s Cloud Launch Team office hours over on the Rackspace Google+ Hangout at 1:00 p.m. CST where we will have our customer FLO Cycling stopping by to chat.

About the Author

This is a post written and contributed by
Alan Bush.

Alan Bush is a founding member & architect of Rackspace's Cloud Launch Team.

Before Rackspace, Alan helped create the Stevie Award winning onboarding program for Central Desktop - a really cool cloud collaboration suite - where he worked directly with companies and organizations like MLB.com, Sesame Workshop, and IEEE.

When he's not helping customers learn how to build awesome things in the cloud, Alan can be found performing improv comedy with Comedy Sportz San Antonio, or grooming his moustache.